Destiny

How often have you pondered your destiny?

Destiny is founded on critical choices made and the subsequent actions that follow as a result. Had I remained single, there would be no Ararat Food. At best I may have been an occasional customer at the Adelaide Hills Farmers Market. This blog would never have seen the electronic light of virtual day, had I not met and married my Lilit, the best thing I ever did. It took me long enough and led me halfway around the world, but each day I weigh my long bachelorhood against my present connubial bliss, embrace of sustainable food farming, improved cooking and writing discipline.

The world’s population has quadrupled since World War One. Since then there have been more dramatic technological advances than in the rest of human history combined. Twelve thousand years of agricultural advance only really got going in the nineteenth century. Kick-started by wartime, industrialisation mechanised farming. Fertiliser and pesticide technology revolutionised productivity. Factory farming followed. Waste became endemic. The seeds of production developed, natural environments were compromised, now carbon emissions threaten our existence.

Life and death have gone into a kind of manic fast-forward in our lifetimes. Humankind’s destiny is more and more shaped by choices made and events that play out in the oxygen of all-pervasive digital media. Two world wars and numerous other conflicts have honed human ability to slaughter fellow humans in numerous well-documented ways. Many of us suffer a kind of techno-fatigue, an inability to master innovations before they are superseded by newer and better toys. Why would you bother learning new skills to sustain our planet when the doom-mongers foreshadow little else but imminent radio-active ruins?

You work hard enough to enjoy your down time and to stay on top of debt. When happiness beckons, you embrace the opportunity. Life is short enough, extended routine broken by sudden moments of change. Who knows where and when the next Parisian-style outrage will be triggered? What incentive is there to care beyond yourself? Vicious ideologues commit random evil acts to incite Western world rage against Islam, us-versus-them mentality, an apocalyptic war to end all wars.

If your glass is half-empty, I can’t help you. No one can help you. Like Hanrahan in Banjo Paterson’s poem: “We’ll all be rooned…(sic)”. The planet won’t have time to die from carbon killing the green. The nuclear holocaust will do the job sooner. The wild-eyed fanatics thrive on hatred. It is their oxygen; it is up to us to inflict slow death on them with continuous ignoring emissions, instead of inciting indiscriminate hatred against all followers of Islam, most of whom are essentially good humans like you and I. Keep your oxygen for the environment.